The high volume of cargo transported in today's marketplace has created demand for quick and accurate resolution of a customer's claim that the customer's cargo has been lost or damaged. Managing a cargo claim can include documenting the claim, deciding how to process the claim, controlling what remains to be done on a claim, managing the various stages the claim goes through, sending information to and receiving information from both the customer and other stations in the carrier's company, deciding whether to pay or deny a claim, creating checks and other types of credits for claim settlement, and tracking cost recovery from responsible parties. A cargo carrier must accurately track and rapidly process cargo claims in order to maintain good customer relations and contain costs.
The high number of customer cargo claims has required carriers to create large volumes of correspondence and documentation in paper form when processing these claims. Present manual cargo claims management systems require managing large volumes of paper, creating tracking and management problems during the resolution of the claims. A manual system does not contain an automated control system or an automated audit trail.
In a manual cargo claim system, it is difficult to tell quickly and easily if the claim is being properly processed because the claim file must be manually reviewed. No automated system exists to determine what information still needs to be received to begin processing a claim. Requests for information about a claim from customers and from other stations in the claims management system must be manually tracked to ensure the information is later received. Since a manual system has no automatic prompt, a request for information could be sent out and the claim file could subsequently sit in a cabinet and wait for a number of days, weeks or months for a response to return. Manual claims management systems typically do not track whether the information was returned or how long the claim file sat awaiting responses to requests for information. In a paper-driven system, no single person or group of persons understood the status of each particular folder. This can lead to customer frustration, because processing the claim may take a considerable amount of time.
Further customer dissatisfaction can occur because the customer service representative typically cannot quickly and accurately determine the status of a customer's claim. When a customer calls, the customer representative must typically make the customer wait for an answer because the representative must locate the file, physically retrieve the file, determine the status of the claim and then return the customer's call. The inability to immediately tell the customer the status of the claim in question can strain the customer relationship.
Frustration can also occur on the part of the customer representative when trying to satisfy the customer's requests. A customer might, over several phone calls, talk to several different customer representatives. Each time the claim folder must be moved to the customer representative speaking to the customer. Also, the customer's file may have moved to a different physical location for further processing. This leads to constant searches for the information and folder. This can be frustrating for both the customer service representative as well as the customer.
Also in a manual system, communication between departments of a cargo claims management system are often slow and time-consuming. Letters to customers in a manual claims management system must be manually generated.
In a manual system, only one person can have access to a physical paper claim file at any one time. Because of the limitations of a physical file, even though some stages of the claims process can happen concurrently if multiple persons had access to the file, only one person can be processing the claim at a time.
Due to work space considerations, physical paper files of claims must sometimes be archived. Once a paper copy file for a claim is archived, it must be retrieved when it becomes necessary to further process the claim.
Furthermore, a manual claim management systems typically does not track the average time required to process a claim or the average time required at each step of the claim processing cycle. Factors such as staffing, work load, claim processing time, and time from customer complaint to resolution of the claim, could not be determined with accuracy because there was no system or method to track this data in a manual claims management system.
Also in a manual claims management, the folder or the information contained within the folder could and did get lost or misplaced. Once lost, the information contained in the claim folder would have to manually reproduced from the beginning of the process. Sometimes this information was irretrievable. If a folder was merely misplaced, as new information came in relating to that folder, the information would either lay in loose form outside of the proper claim folder, or a new folder might be opened, creating the problem of trying to track two folders for the same claim.
An improved cargo claims management method and system would increase cargo claim processing productivity and provide consistency in servicing customers who have made cargo claims.